Well, a new Empire Center for Public Policy report notes that taxpayers have been fleeing some states for others. And New York is seeing more taxpayers move away than any other state. The state’s had Democratic governors since 2007 — and has out-of-control government spending, high tax burdens, over-regulation, uneven job growth and fleeing residents.

Indeed, the five states with the highest out-migration have Democratic governors, while the five states attracting the most new taxpayers are run by GOP governors. -New York Post Editorial Board

In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio is pushing to fine businesses that do not address customers by their “preferred name, pronoun and title (e.g., Ms./Mrs.) regardless of the individual’s sex assigned at birth, anatomy, gender, medical history, appearance, or the sex indicated on the individual’s identification.” The NYC Commission on Human Rights can penalize offenders up to $250,000. -Jonah Goldberg

Urinating and drinking in public would no longer be treated as crimes under a package of bills New York’s City Council will consider to ease enforcement of quality-of-life offenses that lawmakers say clog the courts and have been disproportionately enforced against minorities. -Bloomberg News

New York State accounted for the biggest migration exodus of any state in the nation between 2000 and 2010, with 3.4 million residents leaving over that period, according to the Tax Foundation. Over that decade the state gained 2.1 million, so net migration amounted to 1.3 million, representing a loss of $45.6 billion in income.

ALBANY - Escape from New York is not just a movie - it's also a state of mind. A new Marist College poll shows that 36% of New Yorkers under the age of 30 are planning to leave New York within the next five years - and more than a quarter of all adults are planning to bolt the Empire State... Of those preparing to leave, 62% cite economic reasons like cost of living, taxes - and a lack of jobs.

The city’s hedge-fund executives are flying south — and it’s not for vacation. An increasing number of financial firms, especially private equity and hedge funds, are fed up with New York’s sky-high city and state tax rates and are relocating to the business-friendly climate in Florida’s Palm Beach County. And they’re being welcomed with open arms — officials in Palm Beach recently opened an entire office dedicated to luring finance hot shots down south.

"Who are they?" he said. "Are they these extreme conservatives who are right-to-life, pro-assault-weapon, anti-gay? Is that who they are? Because if that's who they are and they're the extreme conservatives, they have no place in the state of New York, because that's not who New Yorkers are."

These boots were made for walking, as the song goes. Unfortunately for New York, they’re walking right out of the state... Meanwhile, states such as Florida and Texas continue to attract people... The Empire Center’s E.J. McMahon says “a state’s domestic migration rate is the ultimate measure of policy successes or failures.” -New York Post Editorial Board

Taxpaying New Yorkers are leaving in droves for other states. In 2014, 126,000 tax filers fled to other places in the US — more people than in any other state, according to a study posted on newgeography.com. The Empire State also lost the most “high earners,” who reported making more than $200,000 a year.

In a report scheduled to be released on Monday, the city comptroller’s office found that large percentages of New Yorkers earned high incomes and low incomes, leaving a smaller middle class than in the nation as a whole. “There is some evidence of the kind of common worry that New York has a weak middle,” said Frank Braconi, chief economist in the comptroller’s office.

A recent survey by Travel + Leisure magazine ranked New York the dirtiest American city. The online poll of 50,000 people found that rats, funky odors and trash heaps were the main factors for the dubious distinction. If there isn't enough dirt for you, it also "won" the survey for being the loudest and rudest city in the country. It also ranked worst for affordability.

“I see about 20 a day,” a man in Washington Heights told 1010 WINS’ John Montone. One woman said rats have infested her building on 154th Street, where one rodent bit a neighbor’s daughter. “They’re taking over, it’s madness,” she said. A sanitation worker said he has to shake and kick bags of garbage to scatter the rats for fear they’ll jump up and bite him.

It was seven minutes in hell! A nasty rat was an unwelcome commuter on a rush-hour A train yesterday morning — terrorizing straphangers during the agonizingly long nonstop ride from Harlem to Midtown. What started as a typical sleepy end-of-the-week ride between 125th Street and Columbus Circle morphed into an urban nightmare when a woman listening to an iPod felt a scratching on her leg at about 8 a.m. “I started feeling down my leg and I knew there was something furry and large crawling on my leg,” said Ana Vargas, 40, a Times Square hotel worker from Yonkers.

Rat infestations are a common problem in the city, but one resident is taking matters into his own hands. Joseph Bolanos, president of the West 76th Street Block Association, installed rat-crossing signs in his neighborhood on the Upper West Side... "Now it's gotten to the point where people walk at night, and you'll hear screams and shrieks because they get startled by the amount of rats that are running across the sidewalk," he said.

Scofflaws of New York, rejoice — the City Council has cleared the way for you to litter, loiter and pee in the street to your heart’s content... The disgusting and disturbing acts that the council voted to decriminalize include drinking alcohol out of a paper bag, lurking in parks after hours, urinating in the street and making enough of a racket to violate the noise code.

According to local reports, the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene headquarters, which cost taxpayers $316 million, is overrun by bed bugs. The building is 21 floors, and five of those are home to a bed bug infestation. That’s no shock, since the city itself has been ranked the worst in the nation when it comes to bed bugs. This is the second time in under a year that bed bugs have been found in the facility, which is only three years old.

Has your street been cleared yet? Turns out the city's cleanup workers aren't really sure. The New York Times talked to the city's Department of Sanitation today and found that the city's method of tracking street maintenance during snowstorms is (surprise!) "notably incomplete and potentially misleading," and makes it almost impossible to compare the city's clean-up efforts with previous storms.

The study surveyed the city’s 181 ZIP codes for rates of HIV/AIDS, chlamydia, gonorrhea, syphilis and hepatitis B, as well as two non-sexually-transmitted diseases – hepatitis C and tuberculosis. The diseases often occur among the same populations, the study noted. The study said 33 percent of all the ZIP codes in New York City were in the top quintile for multiple sexually-transmitted diseases during a survey taken in 2010.

Humans and rats have been living side-by-side for thousands of years in a kind of uneasy truce, but Animal Planet has named New York City the worst rat city in the world. Rats in New York have been known to overrun restaurants after hours, crawl up sewer pipes and enter apartments through toilets. -Alex Greig

Tourists visiting some of New York's most prestigious hotels have reported being bitten by bed bugs despite their five star surroundings. Guests at the Waldorf Astoria and Marriott Marquis hotel are among those to have been affected by the infestation. Reports of bed bugs in the city's hotels have jumped by 44 per cent over the past year. According to the Bed Bug Registry, which lists reports of alleged incidents, there are almost 6,000 incidents in their databases relating to New York.

Albany: Almost a quarter of the state Senate's Democratic conference was in the FBI's cross hairs last year, according to a court filing unsealed Wednesday. Last summer, federal investigators asked state Sen. Shirley Huntley to invite six Democratic colleagues to her Queens home and record their conversations... Prosecutors have already indicted two of the taped senators, John Sampson of Brooklyn and Malcolm Smith of Queens, but the memo listed four more colleagues: Eric Adams and Velmanette Montgomery of Brooklyn, Jose Peralta of Queens and Ruth Hassell-Thompson of Mount Vernon. Gov. Andrew Cuomo called the situation "complicated, but basically all bad." "I'm just happy that all of this is coming to light, and we're working out the bad apples," said Sen. Tony Avella, D-Queens. "Let everybody wear a wire. It really is the tip of the iceberg — whether it's taking a bribe or pushing a bill for a campaign contribution, it's all unethical."

In New York City public schools, more than 1,000 teachers who have lost their teaching positions still receive their salaries. According to a new agreement between the teachers union and the NYC department of education, they are even getting a raise and retroactive pay...

Several years ago, New York schools received much attention regarding their “rubber room” policy. Reassignment centers, otherwise known as “rubber rooms,” were places where the city sent teachers accused of incompetence or misconduct... Administrators abolished rubber rooms in 2010, but “the ATR is a little bit like the holdover of the rubber room,” said Daniel DiSalvo, Manhattan Institute senior fellow.

The ATR is comprised of teachers who literally have no classroom for one reason or another. Due to a labor contract stipulation, they can’t be fired or laid off, and continue to draw the same salaries as full-time teachers. They’re put into the ATR pool, where they may be assigned to work as substitutes, clerks, or perhaps to do nothing at all.

Nearly 80 percent of New York City high school graduates need to relearn basic skills before they can enter the City University’s community college system. The number of kids behind the 8-ball is the highest in years, CBS 2′s Marcia Kramer reported Thursday. When they graduated from city high schools, students in a special remedial program at the Borough of Manhattan Community College couldn’t make the grade. They had to re-learn basic skills — reading, writing and math — first before they could begin college courses.

A former guidance counselor at a Queens elementary school had feces and urine dumped in her office after she complained about randy staffers who had sex romps between classes, according to a shocking lawsuit. Deborah Berger, 65, says in the suit that after she complained to principal Robert Wojnarowski, he ratted her out to her horny coworkers, who made her life hell. The horrors included dirt being dumped on her desk, feces left on her chair and urine spilled in her office, the Manhattan Supreme Court suit alleges.

The New York State Education Department (NYSED) site contained a section called “Make test prep fun,” which directed students to a site with quizzes that help them find out if they are a “sexy bitch,” “evil,” a “freak,” “insane,” etc. Scrolling down and right on the page, students could also click on the links to take quizzes that would help them find out if they are “sluts,” or “losers.”

Anti-Semitic incidents jumped 27-percent in New York last year, according to a new report. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) says there were 248 incidents statewide in 2012. 172 of those incidents were in New York City, according to the statistics released on Monday. "Jews are still being targeted in significant numbers across New York State," added Gregg Mashberg, ADL New York Regional Board Chair. The report compiled incidents of assault, harassment and vandalism. New York had the most anti-Jewish incidents in the country last year, according to the report.

Speaking in Philadelphia at an event highlighting Amtrak’s unveiling of its newest engine, Biden said, “If I blindfolded someone and took them at 2:00 in the morning into the airport in Hong Kong and said ‘Where do you think you are,’ they’d say, ‘This must be America, it’s a modern airport… But if I blindfolded you and took you to LaGuardia Airport in New York, you must think, ‘I must be in some third world country.’ I’m not joking.”

2014: It’s official. Florida is the nation’s third-largest state with 19.7 million people. It surpassed New York this month by adding an average of 803 new residents every day as opposed to New York’s 140... As the James Madison Institute reports, Florida’s growth is built on a consensus that taxes, spending, and regulation should be restrained.

"Who are they?" he said. "Are they these extreme conservatives who are right-to-life, pro-assault-weapon, anti-gay? Is that who they are? Because if that's who they are and they're the extreme conservatives, they have no place in the state of New York, because that's not who New Yorkers are."

Over the weekend, New York City, defying those who think such a move is insulting to the poor, approved a move by the developer Extell to build a separate entrance at an Upper West Side condominium for its affordable housing tenants... Ironically, the district in which this is located voted heavily for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, giving him 76% of the vote in 2008 and 74% in 2012. The New York Post reported that the new entrance has been nicknamed the “poor door,” and it will be part of the 33-story luxury condo at 40 Riverside Drive

New York City was ranked the least happy city in America when adjusted for income, according to a working study, titled “Unhappy Cities,” released by the National Bureau of Economic Research. The study leaned on a questionnaire that has been administered by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for the last several years and asks respondents: “In general, how satisfied are you with your life?”

A Brooklyn mother says she and her 3-year-old son are still traumatized after she found the boy covered in bite marks and blood in his bed from what she believes was a rat attack. "There was blood all over his pillow," said Marilyn Abreu, who lives in a Bedford-Stuyvesant apartment with her son. The boy had open wounds across his face, neck and feet. Abreu believes he was bitten by a rat or several rats while he slept on Aug. 21. "It wasn't no scratches, it was the actual teeth," she said.

The Rats of New York

Humans and rats have been living side-by-side for thousands of years in a kind of uneasy truce, but Animal Planet has named New York City the worst rat city in the world. Rats in New York have been known to overrun restaurants after hours, crawl up sewer pipes and enter apartments through toilets. -Alex Greig

• “I see about 20 a day,” a man in Washington Heights told 1010 WINS’ John Montone. One woman said rats have infested her building on 154th Street, where one rodent bit a neighbor’s daughter. “

• It was seven minutes in hell! A nasty rat was an unwelcome commuter on a rush-hour A train yesterday morning — terrorizing straphangers during the agonizingly long nonstop ride from Harlem to Midtown.

• Rat infestations are a common problem in the city, but one resident is taking matters into his own hands. Joseph Bolanos, president of the West 76th Street Block Association, installed rat-crossing signs in his neighborhood on the Upper West Side.

NYC Subway Rat Crawls on Man's Face:

New York has the highest per-pupil public school spending in the country, and what’s it accomplishing? A high-school graduate population that’s overwhelmingly not ready for college... only 37 of every 100 students who entered high school in 2009, and stayed long enough to graduate, learned enough by last June to do college-level academic work — or to enter the workforce in any meaningful way.

Thieves crippled service on the A and C train when they stole 500 feet of copper cable from subway tracks near Howard Beach, the MTA said. The cable was taken from roughly 12 locations along tracks and some signal equipment and track components were damaged. The theft caused power failures and created chaos for thousands of commuters Wednesday morning, the agency said.

A new survey reveals that small business owners give New York State a thumbs down for small business friendliness. Thumbtack has released the results of its 2015 Small Business Friendliness Survey and it reveals that the State of New York is one of the least friendly places to do business in the United States... the state was given a “D” for business friendliness, with an F in “ease of starting a business” which brought down the overall score.

&nbspTexas, New Hampshire, Utah, Louisiana and Colorado were rated the friendliest places for small businesses to operate; while Rhode Island, Connecticut, California and New York came in last.

Albany: Almost a quarter of the state Senate's Democratic conference was in the FBI's cross hairs last year, according to a court filing unsealed Wednesday. Democrats have been charged with conspiracy and bribery...

They are sleeping in front of the Empire State building, sprawled in front of the doors of Macy's, and panhandling outside Grand Central. New York is in the grip of a homeless epidemic so bad that it has raised fears of the city slipping back into the disorder of the 1970s and 1980s. The city's police chief this week said that as many as 4,000 people are now sleeping rough in the city, in a crisis which even the city's ultra-liberal mayor has finally acknowledged after months of denials.

A 37-year-old woman is recovering after being stabbed with what doctors believe was a needle while aboard a subway platform in Midtown Manhattan... It is the latest in a string of incidents in the New York City subway system. There have been at least 10 stabbings or slashings in the subway system since the year began.

New York wasn't everything I thought it would be. It did not welcome me with open arms. The first year, I was held up at gunpoint. Raped on the roof of a building I was dragged up to with a knife in my back, and had my apartment broken into three times. I don't know why; I had nothing of value after they took my radio the first time... But I was also scared shitless and freaked out by the smell of piss and vomit everywhere, especially in the entryway of my third-floor walk-up. -Madonna 2013 Interview, Harper's

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) — The Metropolitan Transportation Authority on Thursday said it was “reviewing protocols” after a straphanger’s encounter with a flasher on the subway. As CBS2’s Tony Aiello reported, the woman’s post about the experience went viral on social media – along with a complaint that complained that the train conductor seemed uninterested in the problem. The underground unpleasantness happened on the No. 3 train in Brooklyn, near the Nevins Street station. The rider, Tiffany Jackson, saw the man masturbating while looking at her and she discreetly snapped a few photos.

Police are looking for a man captured on video violently shoving a bag of feces down the pants of a woman walking on the Upper East Side Monday. The 27-year-old woman was walking on East 74th Street near First Avenue at about 6 p.m. when the man approached her from behind, grabbed her waist and shoved a bag of feces down her pants, police said. He grabbed her buttocks, then ran away.

They’re robbed as they walk their dogs, go on moonlit strolls or sit waiting for buses. They’re robbed as they lean on their canes or sit in their wheelchairs. In some cases, they’re shoved to the ground and even kicked while they’re down. More than once a day on average this year, someone over the age of 65 was mugged somewhere in New York City. And the numbers are up, particularly in the Bronx and Manhattan.

The New York City Department of Education doesn’t know what happened to the $84 million it spent on students with disabilities programs, an audit report released Monday shows.

Controller of the audit, Scott Stringer, pointed to the fact that the city didn’t track where money for physical and speech therapy treatment as well as psychological counseling landed. Instead, NYC ended up spending the money on poorly crafted and even completely empty programs designed to scam the government into wasting taxpayer dollars on pointless education initiatives.

“During the audit, DOE represented that it did not have any project plans, implementation schedules, and progress reports to document the steps taken, rate of progress, and total cost” the report reads.

The New York Police Department defied every ICE detainer request it received in the first four months of 2017, instead releasing 179 alien criminals back into the streets, according to the New York Post. -Heather Mac Donald